Digital Access and Equity: What if THEY is all of US?

What if they is us?

I am in the midst of reading Participatory Culture in a Networked Era with the Digital Writing Month community and thoroughly enjoying the format (discussions among Ito, boyd and Jenkins) and the topics, which connect nicely to my own diving into Connected Learning.

Chapter Three of the book centers on access and equity issues (under the academic guise of “genres” — at least, in my mind) and as I was reading, this comic began to form in my mind. It’s a bit metaphorically simple: the locked door and no access to the inside from those on the outside.

But it was tagline that seemed most important to me: What if they is all of us?

What if we (us teachers, us adults, us) are the ones closing that door on different elements of our population? What if we are doing it inadvertently? What if we don’t even know the door has been closed? Who’s waiting out there, wondering?

And then, of course, the ancillary question: how do we break that door open wide so no one feels left out? Pass me that sledgehammer won’t you?

access issue

Peace (in the think),
Kevin

2 Comments
  1. It’s noteworthy, isn’t it, that we are struggling to collaboratively annotate this book and find ways to discuss it in the open.

  2. Kevin,

    I encourage you to link your thinking about “they” from this article to the question I posted, and you responded to, a few weeks ago. http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-do-we-need-to-be-thinking-about.html

    Getting more people to reflect on this question involved one set of challenges. Getting them to the point where they say “how do we break that door open wide so no one feels left out?” would be another set of challenges.

    Innovating, testing and implementing answers to your question would be part of the answers to the first larger question. The cMOOCs are excellent forums for this because of how they engage hundreds, or even thousands of people, in an on-going conversation that grows each year as it repeats.

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